There Will Be Time

Hugo Award: Best Novel nominee (1973).

Soon after his birth in 1933, Jack Havig's parents experienced the first of many frightening incidents associated with their son. One day he seemed to appear double, disappear and then reappear before his terrified mother's eyes. When he was older, his parents were disturbed to hear him telling wild stories about visits to an Indian camp, stories so detailed and realistic that they seemed more than just the product of a child's imagination. During adolescence, the boy disappeared for a long period only to be brought back by a mysterious man who vanished before he could be questioned.

Eventually Jack realized that he possessed an incredible power that set him apart from the rest of mankind. Through the exercise of his will alone, he was able to travel through time! He had visited the past when America was a greener, more beautiful land, and traveling to the future, Jack had seen the terrible consequences of the war.

Catching glimpses of a strange civilization on the other side of the dark centuries that followed the dreadful conflict, he wondered if somehow he could help mankind avoid the war in the first place. If there were any other time travelers and he could find them, perhaps they could do something to stop the coming holocost.

After a search that spanned centuried and continents, Jack found himself in Jerusalem on the day of the Crucifixion. When a stranger approached him and asked if he were a time traveler, Jack knew he was not alone. Together with several others, Jack journeyed ahead through time to America, sometime in the future when savage hordes called the Mong roamed the land.

The time travelers had build a fortress called the Eyrie, ruled over by Caleb Wallis, a 19th-century American. It didn't take Jack long to discover that Wallis was a power-mad despot whose grandiose schemes for "saving" civilization posed more of a threat to humanity than a dozen atomic wars. Determined to thwart Wallis's plans, Jack found himself plunged into a terrifying struggle that would sweep him across the very face of time itself.

In this gripping, action-packed novel, Poul Anderson, author of such books as The Dancer from Atlantis and Beyond the Beyond, once more demonstrates the Hugo and Nebula award-winning talents that have made him one of science fiction's most acclaimed and popular writers.